Games
Having worked my way through just about every SNES RPG of note to me, I have taken on the task of beating all four Dragon Warrior games for the original NES. I managed to beat the first one this weekend. That game is the definition of tedious, but there’s still some subtle charm to it. I need to finish off the Playstation 2 DW game sometime as well.
Let’s see, to list the SNES games I can remember I’ve played since Turkey: Secret of Mana (together with Kristin, why don’t they make more co-op games?), Final Fantasy 2, Final Fantasy 3, Seiken Densetsu, Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, and Inindo: Way of the Ninja. The time required for each was significantly reduced by the fabulous capability of emulators to speed up games while grinding for levels. I knocked out Earthbound in a week or so thanks to this benefit. And that’s a seriously big game.
Dragon Warrior I is a much better game sped up. I turned the speed down to normal after narrowly defeating the Dragonlord. It felt like I was swimming in pancake syrup.
Dragon Warrior II seems pretty bad. I never got too far with it before (we only ever rented it), but you basically have a magic-free tank with a pansy warrior-cleric hybrid and a basically pathetically hopeless pure black mage girl who can’t even hold a leather shield. Even sped up to 200 fps (over 3 times the natural speed of 60fps) it’s even more tedious than Dragon Warrior I, because now you have the overhead of directing multiple attacks and trying to keep your flunkies alive long enough to level them out of their miserable starting state.
And, in classical Enix style, if something dies or runs away between scheduling the attack or spell and executing it, you waste the round. It also lets you cast unfunctional spells without warning. I think by DW IV, at latest, these are largely corrected to the vast benefit of the game experience. Not nearly as much as the infamous “wha ha ha” of the Adventures of Link (Zelda 2) NES game, but the archaic “Thou art dead.” stings a little more than a standard RPG death.
Knocking out DW II (hopefully quickly, as it seems like a small game) opens the way to DW III, which I have also never gotten very far with. It introduces an evolving class system a la Neverwinter Nights that reportedly produces a really awesome and somewhat adaptive game experience. I’m excited to get started with that.
DW IV (one of my all-time favorite games) abandons the multi-class system but replaces it with a ton of characters who ride around with you in a wagon, ship, and hot air balloon. Very Final Fantasy-esque. You also get to develop these characters in four pre-chapters before entering the main storyline. Seriously maybe the best RPG for NES. This includes getting to be a shopkeeper for a while, as much as you want… wait until I get my 200 fps pointed that way!
It might also be nice to play Final Fantasy 1 for the NES while I’m bashing my way through difficult primitive games. I could never get past buying magic, but it would be fun to round out that collection.